Golf & the Oldest Member

The game is serious; the stories know better

The Oldest Member sits at the golf club with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories for anyone who pauses long enough to be caught. A young golfer may think a missed putt is a private misfortune; the sage has seen a comparable event in somebody’s courtship, career or moral education. His advice often arrives as a long tale just when the listener meant to get back to the course. That contrast is the joy of the frame. You need not play golf to recognise the disproportion between a small sporting accident and the enormous significance it acquires in the mind of someone in love.

The Clicking of Cuthbert is the best first collection. It appeared in Britain in 1922; the American Golf Without Tears followed in 1924. The ten stories share the game, but the first introduces the Oldest Member and he narrates all but the last. A book title and a recurring narrator are not a guarantee that every tale uses precisely the same frame. The American text changes some names and local sporting references. If you want an original text for study, check the edition; if you want a story evening, begin with Cuthbert Banks and enjoy the way a literary gathering and a golf reputation become improbable rivals.

The Heart of a Goof is the second principal volume, published in Britain in 1926 and in America as Divots in 1927. Nine more stories pursue the hazards of technique, competition, pride and romance. The newcomer can read it independently, though the first collection makes the Oldest Member’s authority funnier. The golfing language is sometimes technical, but Wodehouse usually supplies the emotional stakes in plain view. A reader can miss the finer point of a shot and still understand why its result matters terribly to someone who has spent the week imagining triumph.

The books are a pair of original story collections rather than a single continuous novel in two parts. A suggested route is The Clicking of Cuthbert, The Heart of a Goof, then the separate later golf tales and retrospective anthologies. The Golf Omnibus, Fore! and other later gatherings may offer a convenient way to read, but they are not a third original Oldest Member collection on this shelf. Compare contents before buying both an omnibus and the constituent volumes. A compilation can be useful without being bibliographically new in the way a newly written story is new.

The Oldest Member’s club is a social theatre. He has seen hope vanish into a bunker and a love affair revive after a shot that nobody expected to succeed. His listeners sometimes have little appetite for a long lecture. We, fortunately, can linger over the telling. An unreliable measure of proportion is part of the comedy: the narrator treats a round of golf as though it can reveal the structure of a life, and the story often gives him enough evidence to make the theory briefly persuasive. These tales honour the golfer’s feelings while gently exposing their grandeur.

The publication record has its own turns. Magazine versions preceded the books; the American and British forms could swap place names or sporting celebrities. Terry Mordue’s notes identify those differences and the first book’s unusual last story. For The Clicking of Cuthbert, three stories from the collection were filmed in 1924 by Stoll, alongside three that later entered The Heart of a Goof. This is a rare case where a specific early film group crosses the later two-volume boundary. An adaptation list should record the individual source tales, not imply that the entire first or second book was filmed as one work.

One can start at the opening collection and then follow a favourite theme. The courtship stories make a fine route for a reader wary of sporting jargon; the competitions give another. After the pair, try the mixed collection Nothing Serious, which contains golf stories, but check its regional contents before assuming a modern volume contains the particular tale you seek. Later book arrangements often shuffle familiar names. The story index and the original collection guides are designed to help find a title in a real book without turning a change of cover into a supposed fresh adventure.

The Wodehouse Society records the silent film adaptations and later screen work, but I only attach the 1924 Stoll stories here where the specialist bibliography supplies a named match. No narrator or current Audible listing is inferred from a generic golf title. A recorded story can be a lovely way to hear the Oldest Member’s measured persistence, provided the listing identifies the text and performer. On paper, the leisurely rhythm is easy to savour at one tale a sitting, preferably with no urgent tee time approaching.

A fan’s favourite practical test is to read the first tale aloud to someone who says they have no interest in golf. The jokes land because admiration, jealousy and false confidence are entirely portable feelings. The sporting details give those feelings a precise stage, while the Oldest Member gives them the scale of epic memory. If that first story works, the next book is waiting only one shelf along, and the later anthologies can wait until you have checked exactly which original tales you already own.

The stories are a particular treat when the listener’s patience becomes part of the joke. I like the way an apparently ordinary club conversation can open into an account of someone’s entire romantic predicament. The game supplies rules, hazards and solemn personal ambition; the storyteller supplies the conviction that a properly related golfing tale ought to explain almost anything.